If you are sitting on an Avios redemption to Dubai you need to think about this. Swapping your redemption – with over £500 of taxes – for a £975 cash ticket is well worth considering, especially if you were having to connect via Heathrow from a regional airport.

British Airways announced a new service to Innsbruck from Heathrow on Wednesday. This will complement the existing Gatwick service.

It launches on 4th December. There will be four flights per week during the Winter season (Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday) and two per week during Summer 2017.

As always with new routes, there should be excellent Avios availability at the moment as all of the flights should have been loaded into the system with at least two Club Europe and four Euro Traveller seats available.

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We have to make the best of it. Too late for UK but it should be a massive wake-up call for the people promoting the ever greater union/ European project thing and with any luck we’ll see a properly reformed EU in 10 years’ time.

What I worry about immediately is Scotland/ reunification of Ireland but I guess we can handle those if they happen. Don’t fancy Irish violence, though, had enough of that.

And what about my retirement plans? Hope they don’t get scuppered but I imagine nothing much will change, we’ll still end up with free movement of people (if not the exact same model).

I’m in the process of closing my Amex MR account down – the only transfer that is yet to complete is a small one to Club Carlson… Am I right in thinking that it’s fine to cancel now anyway? – rather than waiting and paying the £1.24ish/day fee for Platinum?

I did this the other day – had an unprocessed transfer to BA of 3k Avios. After I sent it (10pm), I received the email saying it was processing the next day and cancelled. It hit today (2 days later) without issue, so reckon you should be fine.

This new Qatar deal looks interesting. I am assuming it is only worth switching (taking into account avios earned/tier points) had my reward booking been business class as BA first > Qatar business? Also with Qatar I would have to have stopover which might be difficult with the baby?

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Had booked EDI-LHR-DXB for £1243 plus 38.5k in Avios CW. Saw this, got same dates priced at £1k over xmas, luckily I was in the 24 hr window so got full refund from Ba plus all avios back, and then booked this, looking fwd to Qatar business on 787, thanks Raffles for all your hard work with the site 🙂

OT and sorry to appear daft but just what do I get if I rush to earn BA status points ?

I usually fly out to Asia long haul and have been using Etihad for the last few years largely because of the (then) very generous 3x and 4x mileage accruals, free chauffeur and a pretty good product.

Well, as the mileage bonuses have largely dried up and the pricing is all over the place and with me doing more Europe routes then I have the opportunity to a) use BA Club Europe and b) Qatar (BA Club World product does not inspire on my route).

So from my calculations, I would lose my chauffeur, lose my status (temporarily), have to pay more for Club Europe (I own the company) than an alternative, have to stick to Qatar or BA but would but woul get BA status which offers just what on Qatar and elewhere ?

As I contemplate moving off Etihad (and their family account which I find useful) do you have a matrix of how many flights in business are required to get a free flight in business ? I know it would not be absolutely accurate but it is a single data point which would be useful.

I just redeemed one on Etihad and paid around £200 in fees whereas the Avios redemption on the Amex 2 for 1 cost me about £1050.

What I did notice on Etihad was that when the cash fare went down, the amount of points required to redeem the free ticket went down. In my case from circa 280k to a straight 200k which was a more than pleasant surprise.